It’s my guess that data governance is not — quite — working for you. Sure, in pockets you’ve managed to satisfy regulatory imperatives like GDPR and may even have sustained processes in place for customer and product master. But data governance was not what you thought that working as a data professional was all about when you signed up for data.

If you are the designated data steward, the satisfaction of achieving data policy compliance is personally exciting, I’m sure — the walk through never-ending purgatory, not so much. You may not even utter the term “data governance,” as it may have reached the same fear and distaste as Voldemort . . . or you have put the room to sleep speaking and cajoling your stakeholders to care.

Even my 15-year-old son has heard me on the phone with you, my clients, for years about data governance and is completely baffled and amused that I could be an expert and that people spend money to get my advice. He blurts out “data governance!” as a way to harass me and winds up cracking himself up in the process.

The silhouette of an attendee is seen while he works on an Apple Inc. laptop computer while participating in the Yahoo! Inc. Mobile Developer Conference Hackathon in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2015. The Hackathon is an opportunity for mobile developers to come together and hack around the Yahoo! Inc. Mobile Developer Suite. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

But data governance is no joke, and it is a necessary investment and effort to drive value and monetize our data as well as avoid business risk. The issue at hand: Why does it have to be so hard? Why can’t data just work?

Data governance can be easier, and it can just work. We just have to approach data governance differently.

Join me at the Data Strategy & Insights 2018 Forum on December 4 at 4:15 p.m. I’m going to unpack what really holds your data governance efforts back and share how companies are addressing the challenge head on with ambient data governance. Hear how to:

Put the data experience into your data governance strategy.

Harness the crowd to steward data as part of doing business.

Use AI as a virtual data steward to intelligently scale data governance and activate data value throughout the information fabric.

(This post originally appeared on the Forrester Research blog, which can be viewed here).